The present invention relates to the estimation of resource factors associated with execution of a project.
With the advent of outsourcing in the last two decades, various organizations started outsourcing/redirecting their work to companies that provided them with cost and time benefits. For example, an insurance company in the USA may wish to outsource the maintenance of a set of its financial applications to an Information and Technology Enabled Services (ITES) organization in India for cost and time benefits. Few examples of the work that is outsourced include development of online shopping portals for retail stores, maintenance of existing banking and financial applications, and legal and process documents, and the like.
The companies typically prepare an estimate of such work/projects in terms of resource factors associated with the projects, for example, the estimated number of hours to complete the project, the required number of people to execute the project, and the like. Initially, organizations used to outsource small projects in terms of the amount and budget; therefore, it was easy to estimate the effort required to execute the projects. An example of a small project can be a project for developing a small application used to collect a time stamp associated with each employee in a firm. Further, these projects required less amount of forecasting in terms of effort and were easy to execute.
However, with the exponential growth in business, the amount and complexity of the work being outsourced has increased. An example of a complex project can be the development and maintenance of a finance application for multi-national bank. Further, the expectation levels of organizations in terms of various parameters, such as quality, process management, infrastructure, skill set of the people working on the project, requirement of the people to work in their environment, and the like, have also risen substantially. The estimation of the various resource factors for such projects has become a tedious and error-prone process, since the companies continue to estimate the factors on the basis of their experience and small-scale projects.
In light of the above discussion, there is a need for a method, system and computer program product for estimating the resource factors associated with a project. Further, the estimation should result in an objective value corresponding to the resource factors in order to enable the companies to forecast efficiently and thereby make the estimation process less error-prone.